Coaching Model: cor∃

Overview

The goal of The Core Coaching Model is to illuminate the client’s best self – who they are at their core, underneath stratums of performance.

Core combines structure with flexibility to get beneath the (often many) surface layers and to the clients most authentic self, where they find enlightenment and lightness.

Rather than linear or cyclical, The Core Coaching Model is concomitant; each segment of the coaching model may be accessed at any time, based upon where the client needs to be. The Core Coaching Model does not follow a step-by-step process, requiring one step be completed before the next may be begun. It is, rather, considerably more organic and fluid.

The graphic illustration of The Core Coaching Model is that of a core – radiating a soft glow of possibility, lightness and potential. Surrounding the core are the four focus segments which are an acronym for CORE: Curiosity, Organizing, Realizing, and ∃lasticity. When a client is in the Core process, the coach may move from any one segment to another – without following a predetermined order or process – allowing the clients’ needs to dictate the flow of the coaching sessions. A particular session may be composed of all four of the segments or of only one of the segments – and any variation in between.

Curiosity

Curiosity is a strong desire to know or learn. It is in curiosity that coaches will create space for clients to speak, unveil, and lay out their circumstances, wishes, hopes and concerns. Through intent listening, coaches ask non-leading questions and periodically offer feedback to clients – without judgment or expectation – fostering an atmosphere of not “knowing” the right answer on the part of either coach or client. In curiosity, clients discover and tap new wells within themselves of which they were previously unaware.

Organizing

As new goals, perspectives, plans, and ideas are formed, the feeling of excitement may be mixed with a sense of being overwhelmed. Without structure, desired goals are often unrealized; particularly large goals can have the effect of feeling insurmountable without doing the organizing work of setting the smaller goals along the path to the greater goal.

A coach working with a client in organizing will encourage their client to explore their existing systems and structures as well as those they’ve seen others utilize and those they’ve never considered. The client will create for themselves organized plans to take control of their space, time and life. The intention of structure is to build balance as well as confidence and self-esteem by determining direction. It is with their structures that clients will feel that they are doing what they actually want to do, rather than feeling as if their life is a cycle of events which have been forced upon them.

Realizing

Put into practice, concepts and ideas formed within a bubble will be influenced by outside factors; perspectives, systems, plans created in coaching sessions may shift when applied to life outside of the coaching sessions. While the seeds of core lightness are planted in coaching sessions, it is in the life application by the client that the sustained forests of a new way of being are realized.

As a client applies their coaching sessions to their life, their coach may encourage them to engage in reflective exercises, such as journaling or visualization, to open exploration into how these lessons are and are not working. In realizing, coaches will support their clients as they rework perspectives, plans and systems which are not working and further develop and invest into those which are.

∃lasticity

A static approach to life (and coaching) will not cause growth. In fact, in order to grow, one must be disciplined as well as elastic in their style.

According to propositional logic and set theory, the symbol “∃” is the existential quantifier and used to represent “there exists.” It is for this illustrative reason that in The Core Coaching Model the “E” of elasticity is backwards; at the foundation of elasticity is the belief that through the action of being flexible, growth exists. Additionally, the use of “∃” further illustrates that even without our set paradigms and expectations (such as a forward facing “E”), knowledge, answers and understanding exists – our brain tells us that “∃lasticity” is in fact to be read as “elasticity,” even if at first we must take a moment to allow our expectations of the “correct” spelling to catch up with the possibility of a new answer.

In working ∃lasticity with clients, coaches will help clients shift their paradigms, reframe their perspectives, rework goals and systems which haven’t been serving them, release limiting beliefs, and uncover “stories” which are causing holding patterns rather than growth.